Siegfried (Hardcover)

SIEGFRIED centers around Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and "their child," Siegfried. The book opens in Vienna as an aging Dutch writer, Rudolf Herter (probably Mulisch's alter ego), is approached by an elderly couple, Ullrich and Julia Falk, who tell him they have a story they would like for him to hear. The story is, of course, the story of Hitler, Eva Braun and Siegfried, a boy Hitler eventually ordered put to death.

Ullrich and Julia were employed as members of the household staff at Hitler's country home during World War II. It was there, they tell Herter, that Eva Braun became pregnant and the decision was made that Adolf Hitler, for political reasons, would not marry her nor would he acknowledge his child. It was decided that Julia Falk would "pretend" to be pregnant, complete with "padding," and after Eva Braun gave birth to a boy on Kristallnacht, Ullrich and Julia became little Siegfried's "parents."

Everything might have worked out. The Falks loved Siegfried, they adored him, he was, in every way but biologically, their own son. Siegfried was happy with the Falks. He flourished. But there was a dark cloud on the horizon. Hitler wanted Siegfried killed. In fact, he ordered his execution.

Herter is quite happy to be in possession of this knowledge because, as fate would have it, he had been wanting to write a book that centered around Hitler, but he didn't want to write a history book or a biography based entirely on fact. No, Herter wanted to write something fantastic, something that would delve into the mystery of who, exactly, Hitler was, what his thought processes were and how they got to be that way.

All of this might have worked, and worked well, but Mulisch, after he returns Herter to his Viennese hotel room, slips into the trite and hackneyed and the simply unbelievable. Herter's philosophical (and in the case of Nietzsche, metaphysical) ramblings were simply too much to take. The book went overboard.

In the end, instead of a densely layered, philosophical book like THE DISCOVERY OF HEAVEN, we have, in SIEGFRIED, a book that is part thriller, part metaphysical ramble and all potboiler, and bad potboiler at that.

I guess everyone's entitled to a miss now and then. After all, every book a writer produces can't be perfect. SIEGFRIED is surely Mulisch's "miss." I really can't recommend it at all. I would give it a pass and be happy I did. Read THE DISCOVERY OF HEAVEN instead. There, you'll find Mulisch at his best.

This book covers an intriguing subject, Hitler. The brilliant Rudolf Herter radiates his brilliance a little bit too obviously and this makes this alter ago of the author rather irritating, especially in the first part of the book. As the story develops, the book becomes more intriguing and more pleasant to read. But in the end the question remains whether Mulisch succeeded in explaining Hitler and one can wonder whether anybody will ever be able to explain Hitler.

It's already a third of the way into the book when an elderly couple approach Herter and claim to have been Hitler's personal servants at the Wolf's Lair. When he visits them the next day, they tell him an incredible story of how they came to be his servants and what befell them in their course of service. This middle third of the book is actually quite fascinating, painting a portrait of Hitler's mountain hideaway and inner circle that's quite personal and intriguing. Their story unfolds with great tension until it is revealed that they were enlisted to act our a role as
parents of the son born to Eva Braun on Kristallnacht.

After this stunning revelation (and one or two more besides), the author retreats to his hotel where he falls into a frenzy of philosophizing. At this point, the story comes off the rails, as Herter goes wild linking Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, Wittgenstein, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Pythagoras, the composer Wagner, and Nietzsche in numbing attempt to prove that Hitler was the "incarnation of Nothingness, a zero; just as zero multiplied by any number is zero, [he] consumed and destroyed whatever he touched." All of which leads in turn to a bizarre linkage of the madness of Nietzsche coinciding with the birth of Hitler in some form of transfer of spirit. This hyper-intellectualism crossed with ghost story betrays the first two-thirds of the book and comes across as a bad highbrow stab at Stephen King. Altogether, a bit of a disappointment.